[5][6] In elementary school, she wrote a story about a girl who turns into a tiger, which contained the seeds of her eventual first novel, Bestiary.
"[12] In her review, Luiza Flynn-Goodlett praised the "magic conjured in this collection—lyric intensity coupled with sharp political intellect," saying "Chang emerges as an urgent, sumptuous voice, a poet of numerous gifts and intellectual dexterity.
[7] In a review for The New York Times, Amil Niazi contrasts Bestiary with immigrant literature organized around nostalgia and other sentimentality: instead, Bestiary is "full of magic realism that reaches down your throat, grabs hold of your guts and forces a slow reckoning with what it means to be a foreigner, a native, a mother, a daughter — and all the things in between.
"[19] In a review for the Minnesota Star Tribune, May-Lee Chai says Chang’s novel “reinvents the genres of immigrant novel, queer coming-of-age story, and mother-and-daughter tale.”[20] In 2021, Chang's micro-chapbook Bone House was released by Bull City Press as part of their Inch series.
[27] In an Electric Literature interview, Chang explained that her novels Bestiary, Gods of Want, and Organ Meats compose a "mythic triptych": "The narrators are people who have the future at their back and are looking into the past in a very speculative way.
[28] A few weeks before its May 21 release, it was excerpted in Electric Literature and recommended by Brynne Rebele-Henry, who lauded Chang's work as "balancing desire with the abject, conveying the intensity of first love without the cliché.
[35][36][37][38] Her short story, "Nine-Headed Birds 九头鸟", originally published in VIDA Review, was selected by Matthew Salesses for the 2020 Best of the Net anthology.
[41] In 2019, Chang's collection Past Lives, Future Bodies was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry.